


Affirmations

by cirque



Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse)
Genre: Brother-Sister Relationships, Childhood, Family, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-13
Updated: 2018-09-13
Packaged: 2019-07-12 00:38:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15983888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cirque/pseuds/cirque
Summary: As an adult he would become a trained operative, the best in his field, and a savior to so many desperate people - but that was after, after he was nine and she was three and he poked her in her side to make her squeal as she tried to watch Kermit the Frog and slump sideways on the couch, and she went to kick him back but he had already rolled away, always moving away from her even then.





	Affirmations

**Author's Note:**

> Don't ask me why I'm writing yet more plotless stuff in a niche fandom that I'm sure no one cares about rather than working on my own actual novel because there is no answer.

She remembered him at nine. He was her lump of a big brother, her hero - though Claire would never say it to his face. As an adult he would become a trained operative, undoubtedly the best in his field, and a savior to so many desperate people - but that was after, after he was nine and she was three and he poked her in her side to make her squeal as she tried to watch Kermit the Frog and slump sideways on the couch, and she went to kick him back but he had already rolled away, always moving away from her even then. She remembered him being gangly at nine, tall for his age, but skinny, so skinny. His muscles only came in later and with training - as a little boy he was peaky, with his heavy dark eyes and his sallow cheeks and he pinched and pushed her, his annoying baby sister.

Before he ever became the legendary Chris Redfield, he was just Chris, just an awkward little boy who didn’t know where to put his elbows as they said grace on Sundays, and who looked to his father for guidance, and who was, impossibly, just an unsure little boy. They were children, both of them, though it seemed impossible to her now that they had ever been anything but fighters, exhausted from this war with no end. It seemed impossible to her that he had kicked her under the table and she had yelled, howled, for their mother, who always seemed to prefer him anyway. 

She remembered him at twelve, stopping her on the way to the school bus to pull her lopsided braids from her hair and redo them, gentle not to tug, and he told her in his silly voice that at least she didn’t look like a ragdoll anymore as he slapped the elastics into place. She giggled and whirled around like a windmill and he said in his stern grown-up voice to be careful, Claire, you’ll fall. She would never tell, even if she hated him half the time, that he had learned to do braids just for her, though the boys at school would have loved to hear it. Later, when childhood was just a sacred memory, she would still feel at her long, long hair and remember him tying those plaits with his shaking pre-adolescent hands, wanting so much to make things perfect for his little sister. Their home was falling apart and all he could do was learn, learn to be older than he was, learn to plait and cook and help her with sums and shield her - shield her in the way that he would shield others, later, when he was grown and trained and it all came naturally to him. Years later, when she’d cut her hair short and raggy, she would still feel for it and be shocked, off guard, to find that it was gone, but the sense memory remained even then of him gently shushing her to hold her head still while he worked.

Before - before Raccoon and before Kijuju - after their mother had died but before their father had shrunk into himself like a ghostly drunken thing - before - he sat her down at the kitchen table and put a plate of barely-cooked veggies in front of her, and pre-boiled chicken he’d bought from the store, and called it dinner. He pushed her chair closer to the table like they were at a fancy restaurant and she giggled, just a kindergartener who truly had no clue about any of it at all. It staggered her to believe she was still afraid of the monster under the bed, at four and five and six, that something so trivial had ever frightened her.

“Eat up.” He said, his voice cracking at the end, because even the great Chris Redfield had struggled through puberty like the rest of them. “Eat your veggies and we’ll see about dessert.”

She ate the chicken with a grimace. She was six and hadn’t learned to lie yet, to school her features and pretend that she wasn’t so desperately afraid. “It tastes like plastic.”

“Well maybe it is plastic. Whatcha gonna do about it?” He needled, teasing her as he passed her a napkin and settled into his own rickety plastic chair that their dad refused to replace. 

“Nothin’.” She poked at her chicken with her fork and looked at him disparagingly, her big brother with his silly hair he was trying to style to be in with the older boys, thinking he was cool and clever with the girls, but Claire knew. Claire knew he was dumb and stupid and stole her stuffed animals when he thought she wouldn’t know.

“That’s what I thought.” He pushed her glass of lemonade closer to her and it wobbled dangerously because he didn’t know his own strength even then.

She ate her chicken and even managed a stick of tough babycorn before looking at him, tucking into his own meal like it wasn’t the worst thing he’d ever tasted. “Can I be done?”

He checked her plate over. He was twelve, only a few months out of middle school, just a kid compared to the hard, tough, Officer Redfield. He checked her plate with a careful eye, and hummed, and nodded approvingly and she was off, knocking her chair sideways as she launched for the refrigerator and their stash of puddings.

He started junior high skinny, underfed as only a motherless boy forced to feed himself and his sister could be. Before he had learned to thrive, he struggled. He lowered his eyes in the hall and wanted desperately to be one of the cool kids, but he was only sissy Chris Redfield who carried spare hair elastics in his pocket. They pushed him and tormented him and he let it be, let it wash off his back like smooth water - this was before he learned to fight, learned when to fight back and when to turn away. He was sad, evidently so, and yearned for his mother, and for his father in a lesser way. It was difficult to be him, Claire knew it even then. He struggled at school and he struggled at home, with her. She tried, so hard, but she was six and seven and eight, selfish in her immaturity, asking so much of him. Back then, it had never occurred to her that he had existed before she came along, that at some point he had learned to make space for her in his life. He did love her, she was never in any doubt, but she took up so many of his hours and his days; perhaps he had preferred the way things were before.

She would apologize later, over and over, but what good did it do that thirteen year old boy, who was so afraid all the time? She could only take of the kindness he offered, smile and giggle as he made a fool of himself for her, let him wrap her in a warm blanket in her old tiny bed and watch as he piled all her stuffed animals around her every night, in the rigid order which she dictated with a serious frown pulling her little face together, her red hair all a-splay on the pillow.

He kissed her on her forehead, and the tip of her nose for good luck. His love was simple, and she needed no affirmations of it: it just  _ was. _

“Chris?” She said, and he turned back to her.

“If this is about another stuffed toy…?”

Claire giggled. “No. No no. I just - when will mama be home?”

She hated herself for being so foolish, so immature, even when she was so small. She had not yet learned then what death could be, what death meant to her and to the people she would deliver it to. How death could be a gift and curse, how death was not even the end sometimes. How she would hate it, every time, hate the way the light went out behind their eyes and she felt their last stuttered breath. But then she was too small to hold such hate inside her baby body, just a little wispy child with milk teeth, who knew nothing of killing, who could not imagine herself crawling through blood and shit to rescue her big ol’ brother.

“Claire we talked about this.” He sighed, and it was a man’s sigh, tired of her questions and tired of being the parent. He loved her, endlessly, but he was tired of it. “Mama has gone to heaven. Like gramma and grandpa. Remember?”

Their grandparents had died before she was born. As far as she knew, they had always lived in heaven. As far as she knew, heaven was just some place real far away that Claire couldn’t visit, like the North Pole. “But when can she come  _ back? _ ” Claire did not yet know that heaven was only a lie, and sometimes people did come back from death.

“She can’t. It’s forever, you know that. We talked about this.”

She wasn’t upset. She had cried all her tears for her mother, and now she was only confused, she only wanted mama back right now, right this minute. She held the frustration in her body and scowled at her brother, who was as helpless as she was truly. “It isn’t fair.”

Chris sighed again, a long and forceful sigh that lifted her bangs from her forehead and tickled up her button nose. “I know it ain’t. It’s just you and me. You and me. And dad, sometimes.” 

“When will you go to heaven?” Everyone else had gone to that strange far away place that had no rail lines or mailman, or anything really. All she knew of heaven was that it was a peaceful place, and that it had taken most everyone she knew.

“Not yet.” Chris said, and though she could not tell it then, she had frightened him bad. “I’m staying here with you for a long time yet.”

“How long?”

“Long enough to know that if you don’t go to sleep right now, Santa won’t be happy with you.”

“Nu-uh. I’ve been good this year.”

“Yeah, you have. But good girls go to sleep when they’re told, and don’t stay up asking questions.”

“‘Kay.”

“I love you Claire. I’ll stay with you forever. Now go to sleep.”

He had truth in his eyes, they were close enough that she could count the flecks of green, and see the freckles on his nose from being in the winter sun too long.

“Love you too.”

At seven and eight, when she was just a kid, it was easy to keep her safe. All she needed was food and care and love, and a stern eye on some occasions, and someone to praise her sorry excuse for a science project. As a teenager she was angry, and alone so much of the time, tall like her brother but with none of his patient nature. She did not want for friends or smarts, but she pushed it all away for the hell of it. She had known, at fourteen or fifteen, that she would get the motorbike, just to piss off her dad, just to see that old anger in his eyes, see him look at her with anything other than vague disinterest.

It had started off as a rebellion thing but she’d fallen in love with the smell of oil and the way the chrome would shine when she polished it just so. She’d call Chris for hours and tell him this or that about her bike, the new paint job she was thinking of getting, how she’d rode without her helmet just to feel the wind in her hair. He’d tutted at that, like he used to do when she’d refuse her veggies. 

“Always looking out for me, huh?”

His voice was crackly over the phone. She had no idea where he even was this week, his training took him all over the country and she only ever seemed to have half his attention. More and more she was finding that she didn’t know him very much at all, any more. 

He laughed, and it distorted over the phone line. “You’re going to give me a heart attack with that thing one day.”

She thanked him later, when he grieved for his partner and blamed himself for the whole sorry thing; when she wanted so much to remind him of all the good things he had managed in his life. He had tears on his face and his apartment was a mess, it was always a mess these days. She sat on the couch beside him and knocked his knees with her own, like she had when they were children and she wanted to get his attention.

“Hey.”

He turned away from her, into himself. He was doing that more and more, the grief was taking over his body and mind.

“Hey.” She poked his side, hard between his ribs, and he flinched away, sliding several inches away from her on the couch.

“Jeez! What, Claire?”

“Thank you.”

“For what?” He was so angry all of the time now. He had never been that way as a child, he had always been serious and calm and so honest with her.

“You took care of me when we were kids. You  _ raised  _ me.”

There were a dozen things in his eyes as he looked at her, shock most of all. It must have been the last thing he expected her to bring up.

“I know it won't bring her back - only… I wanted you to know that there's so much good you've done Chris. Not just for me. There's so much good.”

The loss was too fresh in his mind for her words to really have an effect, but he needed this, needed to know that he was capable of more than what their father said. He was changing the world. He had fought against so many impossible things, and he'd inspired her to do the same.

“You taught me so much - how to be brave. How to do my braids. How to throw a knife.”

Before she ever lost him to the grief and the drink and the hole in his own damn mind, she tried to keep him in the here and now. “Thank you for that.”

And he'd smiled, before Kijuju and China, before he’d lost another friend, before she'd cut her hair short - he'd smiled at her, just the briefest whisper of a smile, and poked her side like when they were kids and he'd never held a knife or a gun.

**Author's Note:**

> This man and his PTSD istg


End file.
